Faith
Page 35
‘Everyone’s been telling her that burying herself in her work is the best antidote to grief. But burying yourself in work, to the extent she does, is just a way of escaping from the real world. It won’t help her. It wouldn’t help anyone.’
‘And in the long term?’
‘With love and careful attention, and the children too, she’ll get better. My guess is that they would like to have a female Deputy D-G, just to show everyone how democratic Whitehall can be. I think Bret will serve out his time, and if Fiona keeps her nose clean they will leap-frog her into the DD-G’s office when Bret goes.’
Werner nodded. It was one of my cosy little fairy stories and he knew that. ‘And is that what Fiona wants?’
‘She is going to get domestic help to live in with us and look after the children,’ I said. ‘So she has no plans for early retirement. If they fire me today I suppose I could become one of these new-style husbands who stay at home and look after the kids.’
‘I wish her well,’ said Werner. ‘We need someone like her up there on the top floor.’
I’d always figured they needed someone like me up on the top floor, but I suppose Werner was entitled to his opinion. I said: ‘And I see they are giving you a proper contract at last. You’ll have better job security than I’ve got.’
‘No contract is signed. It was with the lawyers last week,’ said Werner. ‘They will cancel it now.’
‘Why? It wasn’t made “performance-related” was it?’
I heard Bret coming back down the corridor to get one or the other of us. And then I heard Gloria’s voice greeting him. Just for a moment or two they talked and laughed together. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but Bret’s voice was firm and friendly, and Gloria’s laugh was so light and fresh and warm.
The sky was even darker now. The thunder came again. How could the sky be so dark without it starting to rain? ‘What’s all this about having Faith?’ said Werner. ‘What does Bret mean by Faith?’
‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews eleven, verse one. I found that in a Bible I was given recently.’
About the Author
FAITH
Len Deighton was born in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.
After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school – first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery – a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the Observer and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.
Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book, The Ipcress File. Published in 1962, the book was an immediate success.
Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made Bomber into a day-long radio drama in ‘real time’. Deighton’s history of World War Two, Blood, Tears and Folly, was published to wide acclaim – Jack Higgins called it ‘an absolute landmark’.
As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood – ‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’ – and his books have now deservedly become classics.
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Other Books by Len Deighton
FICTION
The Ipcress File
Horse Under Water
Funeral in Berlin
Billion-Dollar Brain
An Expensive Place to Die
Only When I Larf
Bomber
Declarations of War
Close-Up
Spy Story
Yesterday’s Spy
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy
SS-GB
XPD
Goodbye Mickey Mouse
MAMista
City of Gold
Violent Ward
THE SAMSON SERIES
Berlin Game
Mexico Set
London Match
Winter: The Tragic Story of a Berlin Family 1899–1945
Spy Hook
Spy Line
Spy Sinker
Faith
Hope
Charity
NON-FICTION
Action Cook Book
Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain
Airshipwreck
French Cooking for Men
Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk
ABC of French Food
Blood, Tears and Folly
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1994
FAITH. Copyright © Len Deighton 1994. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2011
Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2011
Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978 0 00 739574 3
EPub Edition © MAY 2011 ISBN: 978-0-00-739578-1
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